condoleezza rice

After arguing passionately over proposition 8, I feel that you all could use some humor. This is my first attempt at humor in a long while. It stops when I am depressed and I am trying to recover.

I understand Michelle Obama got a grand tour of their new digs the other day and a little birdie told me that this is how it went down.

Mrs. Bush: (with clenched teeth and squeezed butt cheeks) Welcome to the White House, Mrs. Obama. It is a (makes air quotes) “fabulous honor” for me to introduce you to the loyal household staff and give you the grand tour of the entire residence and state rooms.

Mrs. Obama: Mrs. Bush, the cameras are gone. You can cut the act.

Mrs. Bush: Whew. Thank You. I didn’t know how long I could’ve kept up the act. The truth of the matter is that you people frighten me. I just don’t know what this world is coming to. Your husband’s election over a perfectly good white man is just not right if you ask me.

Mrs. Obama: No damnbody asked you.

Mrs. Bush: Anyhoo, I’ve had two Xanax and two Bloody Mary’s so we need to make this quick before they kick in.

Mrs. Obama: I can handle it from here. Don’t you have some embarrassingly servile House Negro who can show me around while you sleep it off?

Mrs. Bush: Condi is either shopping for shoes or in the Middle East and George fired that turncoat Colin Powell four years ago.

Mrs. Obama: No, Ma’am. I didn’t mean those embarrassingly servile House Negroes, I meant the Black servants that wait on you hand and foot like they’re still on a plantation.

Mrs. Bush: Ron Christie, Armstrong Williams, and Alphonso Jackson are no longer with the Administration, dear.

Mrs. Obama: Nevermind. I see your (makes air quotes) “medication” is beginning to kick in. Let’s just move on.

Mrs. Bush: Mrs. Obama, this is the White House Red Room, one of the White House’s many color themed historic parlors. In keeping with this theme, your husband could entertain his many socialist and communist sympathizers and collaborators as they plot to redistribute the hard earned wealth of the the richest 1%.

Mrs. Obama: Since were on the red theme, is this the room where your husband concocted the twin red herrings of weapons of mass destruction and yellow cake uranium from Africa as a pretext for war in Iraq? Cat got your tongue? That’s what I thought. Why dontcha just keep it moving.

Mrs. Bush: Mrs. Obama, this is the famous Lincoln Bedroom that the previous president kept as busy as a brothel on a Saturday night by wheeling his wealthy campaign donors in and out at lightning speed. Needless to say, we’ve restored the room to its intended purpose. How do you people plan to honor President Lincoln?

Mrs. Obama: The best way to honor President Lincoln, Mrs Bush, is to unify the nation and preserve the union he so vigorously defended, unlike your draft-dodging, chickenhawk husband, and to work across the aisle with mutual respect and bipartisanship.

Mrs. Bush: Michelle, dear, here we have the historic Treaty Room as renamed by Jacqueline Kennedy, your role-model. Speaking of Mrs. Kennedy, I do hope that you can keep better track of your husband than Jackie could. Democrat wives seem to have a problem in that department. Anyhoo, The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in this room by President Kennedy in 1963. Your husband can use the room to surrender our nation’s sovereignty to the U.N. and leave us defenseless in the War on Terror.

Mrs. Obama: Treaties, now that’s a concept I wasn’t aware the Administration knew anything about. Have you ever heard about the Geneva Conventions? No? Neither has GeeShrubya. As for keeping track of my man, nobody whose ever worked for Barack ever slipped up and referred to him as “my husband,” like your girl, Condi. I know my man, but it must be sheer torture wondering whether your husband has a taste for brown sugar, honey. Barack certainly does, and as you can see, (with both hands on her hips) that’s one mission he accomplished when he married me.

Mrs. Bush: (Flustered) Well I never…

Mrs. Obama: That probably explains alot. Can we wrap this up?

Mrs. Bush: Last on our tour is the Diplomatic Reception Room, which serves as an entrance to the White House from the South Grounds for the members of the first family and for visiting dignitaries and ambassadors arriving to officially present their credentials to the President. Y’all can use this room to pray to Mecca five times a day and receive all your terrorist supporters like Ahmadinejad and Hamas.

Mrs. Obama: Diplomacy. Now that’s another concept I am certain y’all aren’t familiar with. How could you be…what with your preoccupation with preemptive war and indiscriminate bombing of defenseless civilians and all. It’s hard to find time to grapple with the complexities of international law and the rules of war when your wars are just shameless grabs for oil and economic supremacy.

Mrs. Bush: Mrs. Obama, that concludes the official tour. Is there anything else you’d like to see?

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I have been angry for a week now and I have heard from you. Y’all gave me much to consider and digest. Wrestling with this has been very, very difficult and gut wrenching. At times I’ve felt that I just needed to let my anger go, embrace the moment, and savor this history making candidacy for all that its worth. Conversely, I’ve thought that this brotha is little more than a Democratic and neoliberal version of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the doublemint twins of right-wing imperialist deception.

Appeasing skittish and racially ambivalent whites that deliberately insult the integrity and prophetic vision of the black church doesn’t work for me. Disassociating from Jeremiah Wright by telling a nationally televised audience that you would not have felt comfortable enough in your church of twenty years to stay if your pastor hadn’t retired just doesn’t work for me.

I want to support this brotha so badly, but I have gone as far as I can. I can’t do it anymore and feel good about it. I’ve decided to vote uncommitted in the North Carolina Democratic primary in protest. Moreover, as of today, I formally withdraw my support of Barack Obama for the Democratic Nomination for President, my bitter opposition to Senator Clinton notwithstanding, and will leave the Democratic Party to become an Independent.

In case you were wondering, I have been this way for a number of years and refused to support Bill Clinton because of his lack of candor and respect for the black community on the Death Penalty in 1992. I actively supported Jerry Brown.

The vast majority of you will never agree with me, I concede that, but I am a race man through and through and this is about respect. If a politician doesn’t respect us, they can never really represent us. It’s just that simple. I’ve made no decision about the fall. I’ll let y’all know.But for today, I decline to support Barack Obama.

His Governorship of Massachusetts was a four-year try-out for the Republican nomination for President.He missed no opportunity to pander to the reactionary base of the GOP with his opposition to Abortion, Stem-cell research, and Same-sex marriage.

Romney has begun to peak in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire and has already outdistanced his rivals in the fundraising department having raised over $ 20 million in the first quarter.The polls have also detected a widespread disaffection in the GOP primary electorate about the contenders and there could be an opening.Name the last time we didn’t know who the GOP nominee would be by now-exactly.

This year is different and it shall be competitive for a change, however, when it is all said and done, Romney will win the nomination and it will be up to him to lead a moribund and scandal scarred party into battle with the Democratic Party looking ascendant.

Next summer, after the Democratic nomination is all wrapped up, we’ll go through a tawdry and insulting little melodrama as Queen Hillary decides with whom she’ll share the throne.As I’ve said previously, I doubt she’ll choose Barack Obama because the Queen doesn’t like to be overshadowed and certainly doesn’t like to be challenged.As of this writing, Barack has already pressed the Queen’s back to the wall on the fundraising front and that s*** means war.My feeling today is that Hillary will rescue some white Senator or Congresswoman from obscurity like Mary Landrieu or Blanche Lincoln to form the first estrogen powered ticket.

Let’s face facts, Hillary has a lock on women voters-particularly women of color.Being in the majority has its benefits and Democratic women far outnumber Democratic men. If Hillary wins this thing, it will because of her advantage among women 45 and over.Moreover, it will also be because black women over 45 voted for her.Hillary has no compunction using the votes of our sistahs to create another all-white ticket and calling it diverse.

I don’t care what she says, she don’t feel OUR pain, Y’all.Mississippi College School of law professor Angela Mae Kupenda wrote provocatively in her Boston College Third World Law Journal article, “For White Women: Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, But We All Hide Our Faces and Cry,” she wrote, “There is no wonder that there is conflict between some white women and some black women.Black and white women have many unresolved issues surrounding the issue of race, generally, and race and sexuality, specifically.Buried inside of some white women may be hatred toward black women because of their white men.”

“During slavery while some white men regarded blacks as animals, they forced black women to have sexual relations with them…Generally, black women and white women appear to be unable to discuss openly—how white women must have felt knowing their white men were desiring black women on the one hand and calling them animals and n___s on the other.Instead of resenting their white male mates, white women took their anger out on their black female slaves.They were unable, it seems, to face that their holy mates for life were willing to sell their own flesh and blood as if their offspring were livestock.So instead of facing this cruelty and naming it for what it was, many white women silently participated in the rape and attacks on black womanhood and actively joined in the systematic destruction of black womanhood and the selling of children with the faces and blood of their husbands and sons, and consequently their own blood.”

When one really examines our politics in this country, plantation metaphors are always appropriate whether it is an examination of gender, race, or class.Maryland Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by choosing a white Republican over qualified black democrats, and it seems to me that Queen Hillary is bound and determined to do the same by passing over Obama. She’ll do it because as Professor Kupenda has written, “White women too are at an intersection.They find themselves in the position of both the oppressor and the oppressed.At one juncture, they benefit by participating in the system manufactured by a racist society.At the other, they suffer as a result of gender oppression from a patriarchal and supremacist society.”

Hillary’s too caught up in the plantation nexus between oppressor and oppressed and will choose gender over race as most white women do. That’s when Romney will pounce and rescue from the ashbin of history, Dubya’s favorite foreign minstrel.

I am a packrat, and have lived my life with the motto: There are just some things that you don’t throw away.You name it, and I’ve kept it.I rarely delete e-mail. I have most of my college textbooks and save every piece of campaign literature and paraphernalia, I get. The same could be said of the white power structure and its collection of useful House Negroes.Some House Negroes are just too handy to be discarded. Especially Dubya’s little plantation mistress.

Mistress Condi will be sold to another Massa to save the Plantation for the party.She’ll go willingly and provide her “services” like the good Negress she was trained to be.

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Sunday morning talk shows are nothing more than televised salons constructed to seduce the viewer into watching and receiving the conventional wisdom that is at its core a pernicious form of corporate propaganda. Once entangled in the web of deceit, the viewer’s mind is paralyzed and sucked dry like a dangerous spider that devours its prey. The viewer, now intellectually anesthetized is no longer a threat to the white power structure that rules this country.

Salons, from their inception, were meant to be social devices where the elite could gather in the drawing rooms of their aristocratic peers to discuss the various issues important to their class in a less formal atmosphere more conducive to free flowing dialog. It is customary for the host to lead off the discussion and insure that everyone has a crack at the question at hand. Good hosts always assemble a diverse guest list with people of various opinions and stations well represented, along with a few decorous women thrown in to keep it lively for good measure.

Nobody was better at assembling the power salon than former Ambassador to France, and Democratic Party doyenne, Pamela Harriman. A British born daughter of aristocratic privilege, Mrs. Harriman made her mark in Washington and Europe as a courtesan of power.

Courtesan, a French term which essentially means socialite whore, is an appellation used frequently by biographers of Mrs. Harriman. She learned her skills at the feet of her idol, the Duchess of Windsor, the former Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee’ who met and married the King of England, Edward VIII, in a salacious scandal which led to his abdication of the throne in 1936 to wed the woman he loved.

The Duchess imparted to her pupil the art of the salon and her unmatched ability to cocoon and control powerful men. Mrs. Harriman used her skills to land a wealthy third husband, former Ambassador to Russia and New York Governor Averell Harriman, with whom she had an elicit affair during World War II. After the death of their respective spouses, they hooked up in 1971.

The marriage led Mrs. Harriman on a grueling quest for power and recognition in Washington power circles. She resurrected and honed the gimmick of the salon to ensnare official Washington into her drawing room to raise money for Democratic Senators. She was rewarded for her dutiful service to the white neo-liberal power structure with an ambassadorship to France in the Clinton Administration.

Like the late Pamela Harriman, Tim Russert is a courtesan of Washington power. His televised salon, Meet the Press, is a seductive forum of corporate propaganda. Like a good socialite whore, he knows how to run a salon, cocoon powerful men, and wield their power as his own. He reigns supreme among his fellow television brethren for his singular ability to use his program to confer the imprimatur of power on those fortunate enough to be tapped by his fraudulent benevolence for a coveted cameo appearance.

Frequent appearances on Meet the Press are status symbols of cachet, relevance, and prestige among the Washington power elite. They are the hottest tickets in town and analogous to seats at a Washington National Cathedral Presidential Funeral. The appearances signal to anybody observant enough to keep score that the recipient has arrived.

In keeping with the ethos of privilege and exclusivity, Tim would have you to believe that his choice of important topics and important newsmakers represents the cream of the crop. Like cream, Tim’s idea of cream is almost all-white. This past Sunday was the last straw. We were treated to an all white parade that is so commonplace among the Washington Sunday Talk Shows. We heard absolutely nothing from those people that was insightful or even remotely newsworthy.

We heard from the same Bush Administration hacks that gave us No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit. Neither Secretary Spellings or Secretary Leavitt have the capacity to think their way out of a paper bag much less come up with policy recommendations likely to avert another tragedy like Virginia Tech. They had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY.

We shoulda heard from the Surgeon General, or a Mental Health expert or somebody, anybody with some muthafreakin’ expertise. All we got was the same beltway B.S. we always hear. In the past 18 months, Meet the Press has had 19 non-white guests which represent an eclectic mix of diplomats, heads of state, the same two reporters, and a few stray uncle toms like John McWhorter an Michael Steele. When we do hear from a big cheese, it is a Republican with a disappointing perm like Condi.

Apparently, Meet the Press has only three black people on speed dial: Gwen Ifill, Eugene Robinson, and Barack Obama. It was no surprise then that Gwen Ifill handed Tim his ass last week for coddling Don Imus or that this week’s talking head roundtable guests were all Imus alums gathered together in silent protest and all spouting conventional wisdom.

My favorite moment this Sunday was the irony of a roundtable of whitefolks celebrating diversity. Jon Meachum of Newsweek made the following observation of the Virginia Tech victims “One, one of the things I found so striking was the diversity of the victims. As you mentioned, the Holocaust survivor, professor who tried to—tried help and save people, the, the number of international students there in the middle of Virginia. It’s, it’s a snapshot of what the country is. And it’s, it’s a diverse country and it’s a good country.”

To bring this post full circle, the true test of a salon is its diversity and its ability to both inform and enlighten. On this score, Meet the Press fails as do the rest of Tim Russert’s white brethren. Hey, Tim, how bout a new closing? How bout, “ If it’s Sunday, It’s Meet the White Press.”